I’ve given up trying to get the right color for our very dark hallway. I was trying to go for a golden yellow color with a hint of green but I kept shooting past the mark. First it was too green and dark, then too yellow. Now it’s too white. I’m mixing cans of paint together and I have about six tints to choose from along with a gallon of pure white.

I’m getting Jerry involved…… FINALLY! I need help!!!!

So I’ve let go of the whole business and turned it over to him. So we put some paint on the walls and the same hew looked like three different colors in three different spots in the hallway. It’s just plain crazy!

I’m going crazy!!!!

Eventually I’m going to have to go to the last ditch resort. I’m going to pray to God to give me some insight about how to proceed. Imagine that, getting God involved. I know he knows the exact color we need. I just have to have faith that he will help.

I work at the discipline of gratitude to keep from falling back into the pit of suicide obsession. Something I can’t afford since God told me that suicide was not an option for me. I had to calm the obsession since being frustrated by not satisfying this obsession made my life utterly, utterly miserable. And, by the way, this discipline was instilled in me by a loving God who didn’t want me to live my life here in misery. So he showed me how to deal with the obsession through gratitude. Not that I still don’t have the obsession though. Deep down it’s just covered over with the discipline.

To my dear sober AA friend,
(excerpts from a letter I wrote to my friend Stewart)

While I was on vacation I had the opportunity to spend a lot of time sitting on the sand dunes where I read and did some writing. The writing started to pick up faster and faster until I was going at it at a furious pace. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I gathered together in words some of the things I’ve come across in my sober journey. In 30 years a lot of stuff’s come across my desk but most of it just whirls around in my head – there’s been no solidity. So I decided to try to create a holding place for some of this stuff. To get it more clear in my own mind and to share via paper with others if they care to know. This way I won’t be cornering them but at the same time get a small sense that I’m contributing.

I’m reading a very good book by Peter Walker called “C-PTSD From Surviving to Thriving“. (C-PTSD – Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder from childhood abuse). A couple of friends from Al-Anon told me about it and I finally picked it up and am reading it. Fascinating and horrifying at the same time. To put it mildly, it’s hot. He uses words like ‘miserable’, ‘tormenting’, ‘having little use for (a child)’, ‘routinely ridiculed’, ‘minimal nurturing’, ‘dangerous’, ‘bitter’, ‘sarcastic’, ‘parental betrayal’, etc. This man knows about C-PTSD from personal experience and 30 years of working with victims of this condition. The book also contains a lot of ‘solution’, not just description of the ‘problem’ like so many self-help books do.

I’ve been free of flour/sugar products for over two years and cigarettes for over one and a half years and I haven’t lost any weight at all. It’s been very discouraging to say the least but I think the tide is finally turning regarding the weight. I think God finally had enough of my wining and stepped in to give me a little advice.

I had a spiritual experience a couple of weeks ago about losing this weight. It went something like this.

God: You know how to lose this weight dear.Me: How?God: You know how.Me: No I don’t.God: Yes you do. You’ve done it two times before the in exact same way with complete success.

EXERCISE !Twenty minutes a day.

God: One time just before you moved to Santa Cruz. And one time while you were in Weight Watchers. It worked like a charm back then and there’s no reason why it won’t work again this time. So… if you really do want to lose this weight… why don’t you…

Get back on the ball.

Well I’ve been doing cardio-exercise (which is what I did before) on the elliptical machine twenty minutes a day since then.

I know I will lose the weight this way. God is right. If I want to lose the weight, I have to exercise. I’ve experienced losing the weight this way two times before. I really do want to lose the weight. Enough so that I don’t have any resentment about doing the exercise anymore. I used to have a big resentment at doing even ten minutes. I’ve always talked myself into this resentment by wining things like…

How come I have to exercise to lose weight and everyone else doesn’t.

But when God talked to me that day, I knew instantly what a load of crap that was. He put on my heart the reality that just about everyone who has a slim figure has to exercise… the same as I would if I wanted a slim figure too. Suddenly, doing twenty minutes a day on the elliptical is a piece of cake. Not only did He give me the information I needed to loose the weight, but He took all my resentment about doing the exercise, away too!

My baptism was ‘not that great’ as it turned out. This is an understatement. Here’s what happened.

I became a Christian in my bedroom, alone, by accident, at 27 years old. The story of my conversion is HERE. Then I was a ‘closet Christian’ for three years before I got with a church. After that, it took another year or so before I got the guts to come forward and ask to be baptized. I knew about baptizim, and I knew you were supposed to get baptized after you became a Christian, right? It’s just something that Christians were supposed to do. You get baptized to declare to the world that you now follow Christ. I had no problem with that. I knew I belonged to Jesus and to God and that I owed my very life to Him.

Life is like a fast moving river filled with spinning logs. We spend our lives frantically leaping from spinning log to spinning log trying to stay afloat. Mentally, emotionally, physically, we leap.. and leap… and leap. But God lives in the calmly moving depths of the water between the spinning logs. How did I connect to Him there in the depths? How did I stop frantically leaping from spinning log to spinning log to get to Him? The answer… one time I stopped leaping. It sounds impossible but one time I sat down on a log and gazed into the water to look for Him… and I found Him there and saw Him return my gaze. It was marvelous. The spinning logs be damned, this is where I finally found peace. I stopped the constant leaping from log to log, and as I sat down on the log I found that it stopped spinning. I sat down for a time and gazed into the water, and He helped me with the constant spinning. And all I did was just sit down.

No… really… It was a dark and stormy night. I was six years sober at the time. SIX YEARS SOBER AND I STILL HAD THE OBSESSION TO DRINK! YIKES!

Don’t ask my how I could have pulled that off. How can a drunk, who is drooling for a drink, not drink… for six years. Fear. That’s all I can say. Plain fear. Unadulterated fear. I’d had a vision of my life if I’d continued down the drinking path, and it wasn’t pretty. It was a horror movie. God showed me my future in living color six years before that, and I couldn’t deny the truth of that future if I continued to drink the way I was doing. And I couldn’t stop the drinking the way I was doing it. So I dragged myself to A.A. and they got me sober.

When I am quiet in the morning I imagine the love of GodHe is the FatherHe wears a long heavy cloakHe draws me to Him~ gently ~~ slowly ~~ tenderly ~~ sweetly ~He enfolds me into His heavy cloakI lay myself against His chest I am ~me~ I am accepted I am ~me~ I am encouraged I am ~me~ I am warmI am ~me~ I am safeThis is my Father’s love for meI can stay here for hours.Talking with Him.I never want to leave this place.

Suddenly I find I can meditate! I’m doing it for an hour a day with almost no trouble at all. AA’s Step 11 (Sought through Prayer and Meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood him) was absolutely impossible for me. It used to be, even at 34 years sober, that I couldn’t sit quietly for even a couple of minutes. The goolie and goblins would get me. Those goolies called:

You’re nothing but a piece of shit! You ought to be ashamed of yourself! No body wants you let alone loves you! Why don’t you just go away and die! (etc, etc, etc.)

Yet now I am feeling this way on a long term basis not just for a day like I was here.

This ride of ‘no addictions or obsessions’ has suddenly transformed itself. Up until now, I’ve been careening at break-neck speed, through the pitch blackness, on a hairy, frightening, roller coaster; being tossed around like a rag-doll, completely out of emotional control. But suddenly, an abrupt change has occurred. Suddenly I’m finding myself in a place of absolute quiet stillness. It feels like I’m riding on a smooth white platform that’s silently and swiftly skimming across the surface of a pale blue, sparkling, glassy sea.

It is my belief that the above passages infer that every person (and not just Christians I might add) on planet earth carries a piece of our holy creator within themselves. From the president of the United States to the people who call the streets their home… everyone carries a piece of the Holy God… an image of Him… inside their persons (however, those who heed God’s call to Jesus the saving Christ, have a soul redeeming relationship).

Something very interesting happened tonight that I thought you would like to hear about. I’m taking training to be on the Crisis Call Center hotline. This evening we did role playing with the trainers for the first time in the training. Well I did a pretty piss-poor job of it and the feed-back I got from the others showed that too. This would have been a perfect ‘set up’ for me to rail against myself you think, wouldn’t it? This would have been the perfect situation for the ‘ugly voices’ to have come at me – enforce.

What if you’re a Christian… and you have Attachment Disorder… what do you do… with God?

I’ve been in Alcoholics Anonymous a very very long time and I have a lot of time without alcohol. I’ve tried to follow the ‘program’ for all I’ve been worth but have been a miserable failure at it. The only thing I’ve managed to do… by hook and by crook…sometimes by the skin of my teeth… is to not drink.

I continue on in my quest as an addict into the world of no addictions.

It’s been officially a year now since I put the sugar down; six months since the cigarettes. I’m digging deep into my psyche. It started out with curiosity. I’ve been desperate to know… “Through practicing all these addictions, what the heck have I been running away from so hard?” Now it’s come to take on a life of it’s own. Here’s where I now.

There’s a drug that my psychiatrist prescribed for me a few weeks ago called Prazosin. It’s for PTSD. He said it was a pretty old drug – from the 70’s – and was used to treat high blood pressure. However, one of the other things it does is calm the adrenal glands so that they don’t pump out adrenalin so furiously the way they do in PTSD victims who are in constant ‘fight or flight’ mode. Anyway, since I’ve been on this drug I’ve begun to get clear-headed in a way that I’ve never been aware of before.

Love is an archetype here on earth of what is happening in the heaven-lies.

Many people try to define the term Love, yet no matter how they try to define it, it somehow seems to be indefinable. I believe this is because Love is not a thing to be grasped. This is not a ‘something’ but in reality only occurs in the absence of something else. Continue reading →

A12: I’m ok I guess. The last few days I’ve been bingeing on Salt Water Taffy though. I haven’t eaten any of my ‘alcoholic foods’ (sugar/flour junk) for over eleven months now, but I guess I have to add candy to the list of foods I can’t control. Damn it!!! When is all this crap going to be over??!! I keep running to earthly answers to my emotional pain. When is it going to end?! — but otherwise — I’m ok I guess.

I’ve been so angry lately. The little girl is angry. The one who took all the abuse for the rest of us. She’s angrier than all get out. “It’s not fair”, she says about taking the excess food away. “As if trying to live in this world isn’t bad enough for me, now you have to take my food away too?!! What’s next!!? Are you going to try to get rid of me altogether!!?”

Up to the age of 27, I had never encountered what people call… Love. My parents didn’t know about it, nor could they recognize it either. In fact, they came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as Love. There was no Love in my childhood and when I became an adult, I was savage enough that, even if I did happen to come across it, I wouldn’t have recognized it if it had come and kissed me on the cheek. I ran away from any kind of closeness others might have wanted with me. By the time I was adult age, the only feeling I had for others was… fear… even terror.

I want to apologize for the quality of my writing lately. Since the writing of the above post, I haven’t been getting very good sleep and, even though I’ve seen my psychiatrist three times in the last two weeks, the medication regime adjustments for the Bipolar, have not yet helped very much.

I don’t think that the AA slogan: “Uncover; Discover; Discard” is something to try to push an alcoholic, who was abused as a child, to do. Furthermore, I don’t think it is a saying that Bill and Bob would have approved of either.

I am the Lord your God, who rescued you from the land of Egypt, the place of your slavery. You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea.

These are the verses I’m totally laser-focused on right now. I am doing my level best to live by them. Suddenly I can see their profound meaning for our current times – as clear… as… day. To put it mildly, the rewards for making God my main man, are astonishingly miraculous.

(sorry this is so long – I couldn’t make it any shorter and still say what I needed to say).

I’ve been out in the field with God for a long time, but have taken many long, long ‘breaks’ (through various addictions) from my studies. Though I’ve been freed from alcohol obsession for 34 years, I’ve been substituting many other secondary addictions to take it’s place. I could not stop these other addictions myself, so I’ve been praying, for all my sober 34 years, to have these other addictions removed. With all my heart, I’ve wanted “No other gods before God”.

(I wrote this e-mail to an AA friend/sponsor, after waking up at 4 am from out of the haze of several very tricky victim dreams. I have used tricks in the past to deal with these types of dreams, but this time they were so tricky that none of the tricks I’ve used, to neutralize them, worked. This is why I decided to get up and write this e-mail to my AA friend.)

This ride of ‘no addictions or obsessions’ has suddenly transformed itself. Up until now, I’ve been careening at break-neck speed, through the pitch blackness, on a hairy, frightening, roller coaster; being tossed around like a rag-doll, completely out of emotional control. But suddenly, an abrupt change has occurred. Suddenly I’m finding myself in a place of absolute quiet stillness. It feels like I’m riding on a smooth white platform that’s silently and swiftly skimming across the surface of a pale blue, sparkling, glassy sea.

I hope this makes some sense to those of you who are reading this. Now that I’m no longer living in the pitch blackness of addictions, I’ve had a revelation this morning of gigantic proportions. In the bright light of day, I am seeing someone brand new that I didn’t even know existed.

I used to have difficult feelings of aloneness and rejection because of being mostly alone here in blog-world, but this is changing. I still feel like I’m pretty much alone here, but since the ability to God/Self Soothe has ‘clicked in’ (by going through what I did the last 2 months) I’m definitely holding within myself, a dramatically different view of this aloneness. I think what I’ve been doing so far has really pushed me around the corner in my ability to adapt to inner and outer stresses. I really do believe I’ve come to a place where God is truly my ‘center’ – for everything.

Something profoundly wonderful has happened to me of late. It started in 1980 when I gave up my primary addiction – alcohol. Not long after I got sober, I began to lean very heavily on junk (flour/sugar) foods to distance myself from the agony of life without booze. I knew that doing the food thing was not good, but I was in so much emotional angst that I couldn’t stop myself. Two years into the agony of giving up this primary addiction, I had my first experience with your Christian God who (through the person of Jesus Christ) got through to me, in a very powerful way, how much He deeply, profoundly, and unconditionally, loved me. And He gave me the Holy Spirit in a very palpable way.

Just a warning. This is a very dramatic exposé. I’m going out to the edges on this one. But there has been a lot of drama, and I had to write it the way it happened. I’m also sorry it’s such a long read, but I made it as short as I could without leaving out anything important to the story.

This is a continuation post about my experiences facing crisis without resorting to any addictive substances or obsessive behaviors I’ve always run to, to escape the emotional pain life crises like this one, have brought me.

(this particular post is out of sequence. I included it because it was written at the very beginning of the experiment. However, I was still smoking at this time.)

* * *

I’ve been abstaining from junk food and compulsive overeating for 40 days tomorrow and I’m beginning to feel like I’m slogging up-hill with it. Today was tough and the absence of weight-loss is making it doubly tough.

I go to God (Pops is my name for Him) with almost all my problems and dilemmas and we have ‘talks’ until I get my head straightened back out again. This is one of those talks.

I'm Michelle. This is my blog. I write about women and fatness, expound upon semi-coherent thoughts I have in the middle of the night, and offer tough love to those in whom I am disappointed; they are legion.